3. Bush didn't have the power to redesign the hurricane as he designed his response to it.

4. The Republican Bush believed he could not simply bully past the
Democratic Mayor of New Orleans and the Democratic Governor of Louisiana
and impose a federal solution, but the Democrat Obama and his party in
Congress aggressively and voluntarily took over an area of policy that
might have been left to the states.

5. The media were ready to slam Bush long and hard for everything —
making big scandals out of things that, done by Obama, would have been
forgotten a week later (what are the Valerie Plame-level screwups of
Obama's?) — but the media have bent over backwards for years to help
make Obama look good and to bury or never even uncover all of his lies
and misdeeds.

6. If Bush experienced a disaster like the rollout of Obamacare, the NYT
wouldn't use its front page to remind us of something Bill Clinton did
that looked bad.

But let's check out the asserted parallels in that NYT article by Michael D. Shear:

The disastrous rollout of his health care law not only threatens the
rest of his agenda but also raises questions about his competence in the
same way that the Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane
Katrina undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency.

But unlike Mr. Bush, who faced confrontational but occasionally
cooperative Democrats, Mr. Obama is battling a Republican opposition
that has refused to open the door to any legislative fixes to the health
care law and has blocked him at virtually every turn.

But think about it this way, NYT. What if Bush and the Republicans had
created the hurricane, and the Democrats adamantly believed it would be
better not to have a hurricane? Would the Democrats have been
"occasionally cooperative" to Republicans who smugly announced that they
won the election and they've been wanting this hurricane for 100 years and canceling the hurricane was not an option?

Republicans readily made the Hurricane Katrina comparison.

Oh? Note the wording. It doesn't say that important Republicans were
bringing up Katrina on their own. I suspect that the journalist, Shear,
asked various Republicans to talk about Bush and Katrina and some of
them did.

“The echoes to the fall of 2005 are really eerie,” said Peter D. Feaver,
a top national security official in Mr. Bush’s second term. “Katrina,
which is shorthand for bungled administration policy, matches to the
rollout of the website.”

Okay, so Shear got Feaver to put a name on the assertion that
Republicans made the comparison. No other Republican is named. Shear
moves on to Obama's "top aides" and tells us — here's my point #5 again
— that they stressed how unlike Katrina it is, since "Mr. Obama
is struggling to extend health care to millions of people who do not
have it. Those are very different issues."

I agree. The health care screwup isn't a natural disaster. Obama and the
Democrats made their own disaster, stepping up to do something they
should have known they weren't going to be able to do well, and they
lied about what they were doing to get it passed.

And yet they meant well. They wanted to help people. Unlike Bush, who — what? — asked for that hurricane?

If I invoked the Insurrection Act against [Governor Blanco's] wishes,
the world would see a male Republican president usurping the authority
of a female Democratic governor by declaring an insurrection in a
largely African American city. That left me in a tough position. That
would arouse controversy anywhere. To do so in the Deep South, where
there had been centuries of states' rights tensions, could unleash holy
hell.